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Thomas Southerne
Thomas Southerne (1660 - 26 May 1746) was an Irish dramatist.

Thomas Southerne, born on February 12, 1660, in Oxmantown, near Dublin,was an Irish dramatist. He was the son of Francis Southerne (a Dublin Brewer) and Margaret Southerne. He attended the Trinity College, Dublin, in 1676 for two years and transferred schools. In 1680, he began attending Middle Temple “Hall” to study law but was drawn away by his interest for theatre. By 1682, he was greatly influenced by John Dryden and produced his first play, The Loyal Brother, or, The Persian Prince, which he would have to buy the prologue and epilogue back from Dryden. In 1864, Southerne produced his second play, The Disappointment, or, The Mother in Fashion. However in 1865, he enlisted as an ensign in Princess Anne’s Regiment of the Duke of Berwick’s Foot, and eventually gained the command of a company. The “Glorious Revolution” in 1688, resulted in Southerne leaving the army. Fortunately for Southerne, the plays he had written before he withdrew from the army would see the light of day for he had returned to theatre. With his return he took on a new form of genre for his writing, “he turned from political allegory to comedy” (Kaufman). In 1690, Southerne made his first financial profit from his work. In 1691, he encounters failure with his play, The Wives’ Excuse, or, Cuckolds Make Themselves, which was produced by Dury Lane. This failure would not stop Southerne, and so in 1693, he wrote another comedy, The Maid’s Last Prayer, or, Any Rather Than Fail, which was a success. In 1692, he was blessed with the opportunity by finishing Dryden’s tragedy, Cleomenes. In February 1694, he created the tragicomedy The Fatal Marriage, or, The Innocent Adultery, which was a huge success and resulted in him being established as a tragic dramatist.

By 1688 as token for his sixes his “ subject once again in a novel by his Colleague Aphra Behn. Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave”  which was performed as a play and was a huge success. According to Kaufman, “At the age of sixty-seven Southerne offers one last play, Money The Mistress in  1726, it is a weak conclusion to an honorable career.” He was honored as a playwright. On May 26, 1746, at the age of eighty-seven Southerne died. According to Kaufman, “He was a successful man of the theater, a working playwright for forty-four years.” His best plays, The Wives' Excuse, The Fatal Marriage, and Oroonoko, reveal a competent, indeed interesting, playwright. He experimented in a variety of dramatic forms. His contemporaries valued him for his ability to portray intensely emotional scenes and for his "pure" language. He worked in the tradition of Otway, and his tragedies point the way to his successor, Nicholas Rowe. In comedy his subject is the distressed wife, and here he offered a pattern for such playwrights as Vanbrugh, Cibber, Congreve, and Farquhar. Today readers are interested in his psychological realism, his portraits of complex characters, often women in the throes of domestic distress, and his coldly realistic, often harsh, analysis of corrupt societal relations.”

Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko
Thomas Southerne also wrote the play Oroonoko. One of the major change that Southerne made to his play from Behn’s version was that he turned Imoinda’s skin color from black to white. “She becomes the invisible and reconstructed black female subject in the America’s cultural discourse” (MacDonald). Southerne plays with the idea of a double plot: one path that deals with the tragic fates of the newly interracial African lovers and the other on Charlotte’s comical take on finding rich husbands for herself and her sister. Through his double plot, Southerne had hoped to illuminate a “twinned relationship between white women's social representation and black women's invisibility and lose of agency under colonialism's raced visual regimes” (MacDonald). At one point, he puts Imonida in a heroic situation where she drives the governor off with her sword when her tried to rape her. In Southerne’s play, she fights beside her man during the rebellion with her bow and arrow. She also was the one who used her words to persuade Oroonoko to kill them both and vindicate the honor and the innocence of their love. She was the one who helped guide his knife into her body. Southerne does not speak of the advantages of a white womanhood like most novels during colonialism, but speaks of the unfairness and the treatment of the slaves no matter the color of their skin or gender.

According to T. J. Cribb, Behn mentions that Oroonoko experiences some conflict between his devotion to Imoinda, and his need to rebel, which gives Southerne an opportunity to build Oroonoko's character on this conflict, making it a source of the play's actions. Behn ends the novel with the brutal death of Oroonoko, but the play written by Southerne ends with the “love death” with Imoinda fulfilling his pact with her. Southerne also emphasizes Oroonoko’s honor and writes about how Oroonoko gave a speech on justifying slavery in terms of private property and civil contract. Oroonoko speaks of how their owners have paid for them and now they are a part of their estate and they may not like it, but they are no longer individuals, but pieces of property. Southerne expands the idea that even though the harsh treatments, Oroonoko is willing to come to terms with his situation and make it work.